Today, Stan and I got the chance to speak with Andrew Hastie MP — Federal Liberal Member for Canning and Australian Shadow Minister for Home Affairs. Andrew has often been spoken about as a future leader of the Liberal Party. He is clearly a person thinking deeply about what it means to take a reflective approach to politics, particularly on his side of the conservative political tradition.
I was impressed by Andrew’s thoughtfulness, humility, and appetite for ideas and intellectual exchange.
We spoke about the political vocation, his calling to it, the suffocating demands of modern political life, and how Andrew’s experiences before politics in the elite Special Air Services Regiment (SASR) in Afghanistan shaped what he describes as his “Burkean” outlook. We discussed our mutual interests in the writings of Burke, Lincoln, and Cormac McCarthy, and reflected at length on what an Antipodean conservatism — one that seeks to unify the traditions of First Nations people with that of the Australians who have since sacrificed their lives for the country — might look like.
What I hope stands out to you about this conversation is that Andrew, Stan, and I each came to it with a different political persuasion — Stan is deeply influenced by his Wiradjuri Catholicism, Andrew by his Protestant conservatism, and I by my Burkean reformism — and yet we were able to share in this enriching exchange from our mutually respectful yet differing perspectives.
I wish Andrew well, and am glad that he is in Australian politics; it’s a joy to find a politician who is able to think and speak on his feet like a human being.
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